Bill Drafting with Microsoft Word

SOURCES OF MATERIALS FOR DRAFTING

Several important materials are available at the webpage for the Office of Legislative Services:

http://www.legis.state.wv.us/Joint/legis_services.cfm

On this webpage you will find links to documents that you may download to get you started. The

first of these is the Bill Drafting Manual. It is used by all attorneys at the Legislature to prepare

bills and resolutions. The Manual explains the Legislature’s conventions used in wording,

formatting, and legal writing. It contains many examples to illustrate the most common situations

relevant to legislative bills.

Another useful file is the basic bill template. This is what our drafters use to build a bill for

introduction. This template also contains the style sheet information for the proper formatting of

various parts of a bill.

Using the Flash Drive

The flash drive provided by Legislative Services contains a series of files, in Word format,

known as the Drafter’s Code. This contains the latest revisions to the Code plus some

recommended amendments to revise gender references and remove certain deprecated

language. All files are in a folder on the disc named “WV Code” and it is organized into

subfolders for each chapter of the Code, e.g. “WVC 11” for Chapter 11. Within each chapter

folder your will find all of the sections for that chapter as well as files for the chapter and article

headings.

The root directory of the flash drive also contains a copy of the basic bill template and the Bill

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Drafting Manual.

CREATING A BILL

To begin creating a bill, open up the bill template in Word. You should see a page that looks like

this:

Since this is just a template, you should immediately save this as a separate document under a

name that you wish to use for your bill draft. You can then begin to add text to your bill.

As you are probably aware, the new bill format uses a cover page for the information that

previously appeared in the bill heading on the first page of bills. There are several fields for

information on this page that may be completed later by legislative staff and you do not have to

fill in or change many of these fields. In most cases, the only text that you may want to change

is the name of the chamber and the sponsor information.

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When you click on the text that says, “Enter Sponsors Here,” a thin outline appears around this

text and you can simply overwrite this text with the name of the bill sponsor. For example,

“Delegates Allwork and Often” or “Senator Howse.”

The second page is for the real substance of the bill. There are two areas (fields) that hold the

place of the Bill Title and the body of the bill, although these are not indicated by boxes or

shaded areas.

The line numbers are already set up in the document and the first line number one is for the

section of the bill known as the Bill Title. The second line numbered 1 is the place where a

drafter writes the operative portions of the bill. * Most drafters prefer to work on the actual text of

the legislative code first. Later you may return and prepare the Title to reference the Code

sections that are to be affected by the legislation. You may begin writing from scratch, but often

you’ll probably want to pull in text that already appears in some other form. Typically, this

involves inserting code sections from the Drafter’s Code or pasting text from an old bill or a draft

provided by someone else. We’ll explain both of these methods below.

*
PLEASE NOTE that with bills for the 2018 Regular Session, we no longer include the portion, commonly
called the ‘enacting section,’ which listed the individual sections affected and whether these were
repealed, amended or added. Since this is redundant of the language in the Title, bills will no longer
contain this element.

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INSERT CODE SECTIONS AND HEADERS

There are two ways to insert sections of the Code into your draft bill. One method is to open

one of the section files and then copy the text from that file into the bill shell. The other method

is to insert the text from the section files from within the bill shell once you have begun your

draft.

In 2007 Microsoft did away with the File, Import command that allowed a person to pick other

documents and insert them into a working document. If you search for this in Word’s Help files

you won’t be able to find it. Instead, this procedure is called Insert, Object, Text from File. To

begin the process, make sure your cursor is placed at the spot in your document where you

want to insert the Code section or header.

Next, go to the INSERT tab on the Word ribbon. There is a group of icons labeled “Text” that

look something like this:

Word 2007

Word 2013

Look for the small button labeled “Object.” When you click on this, there are two options that

will appear.

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Select “Text from File…” to open a file selection dialog box and then navigate to where the

Code files are kept (such as the flash drive.)

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Since there are over 29,000 Code files you may not want to scroll all the way through the list to

find the one section that you seek. Word can help you narrow down the list if you type the

beginning of the filename:

When you insert several Code sections, you probably will see some hiccups in the line

numbering when the text shifts from one section to the next.

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If you wish to update the line numbering yourself, please see the “LINE NUMBERING” section

below for an explanation of how to restart line numbers with each section. On the other hand, if

you are merely preparing a draft for review and don’t need to have the line numbering in final

form, you may ignore these numbers and this can be fixed when the bill is submitted to

Legislative Services.

Inserting Chapter and Article Headings

To add a chapter or article heading, look for the filenames with trailing dashes. Chapter

heading files will only have the chapter number and a dash. (Example: WVC 29 - .docx) Article

heading files have the chapter number, a dash, the article number and another dash in the

filename. Example: WVC 61 – 4 - .docx will give you just the article heading, like so:

ARTICLE 4. FORGERY AND CRIMES AGAINST THE CURRENCY.

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USING TEXT FROM OTHER SOURCES

Frequently you will have a document, such as an old bill, that you want to use to start out your

draft or reformat into a new bill. In this case there will be portions of the document that you want

to copy and paste into your draft.

Text Formatting and the Paste Options icons

When you paste text into your document, you have several options as to how Word will handle

formatting information that is contained in the copied material. These options are typically

displayed with these icons: The first icon will paste the text exactly how it

was formatted in the source from which you copied it. The second icon attempts to merge the

formatting from the source with the formatting in your bill. The third icon pastes the plain text

into your document without any formatting from the source. We don’t recommend the middle

option because it can lead to unpredictable results. Most users will only want to use the Keep

Source Formatting option or the Keep Text Only options. The option that you choose will

depend on your source and what information you are trying to preserve.

If you are using source material, such as an old bill, that contains strike-throughs and

underscores and you wish to keep this mark-up, you will need to use the Keep Source

Formatting option. This is the only option that preserves strike-throughs. Note that this option

will also keep other formatting such as indentations, tabs and fonts, which you will then have to

correct using the Styles tools described in the next section. In many cases, you may have to

remove some extra spaces and tabs manually. Another issue with this option is that special

symbols, including section symbols may not translate properly.

If you are copying from a PDF document that has line numbers or if you do not need to worry

about strike-throughs, then the preferred paste option is to Keep Text Only. When you paste

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text into your document with this option, the text will be formatted to match that portion of the

document in which you are working. In most cases, you will not need to modify the formatting of

the text in any way.

USING STYLES TO FORMAT TEXT

Because the format of legislative bills follows a consistent and predictable pattern, Word makes

it simple to apply formatting to each part of a bill. All the necessary formats for these parts have

been set up as text styles that are available from the ribbon under the HOME tab. When you

have the HOME tab selected, you will see a group of styles that will look something like this:

The number of styles that you can see will depend on the size of your screen and the size of the

Word window on that screen. To see all of the bill formatting styles, just click on the expansion

button on the right edge of this group. It is the small button with a line and a tiny, inverted

triangle.

When you click on this button, a larger window appears showing all style options.

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To format a block of text, simply highlight the text in your draft and then click on the

corresponding style in this window. Thus, if you create a new article header or insert an article

header from a differently formatted source, you would highlight all of the text in your header,

and then click on the Article Header style. This action formats the line in one, simple operation.

If you have a portion highlighted, you can preview how the text will look in your document by

hovering the mouse cursor over the style you wish to preview. This temporarily reformats that

highlight portion of your bill until you click to make the format permanent or until you hover over

another style to preview that one.

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OUTLINE LEVELS

Standard West Virginia Code citation uses the format Chapter-Article-Section with alphanumeric

identifiers for each of these elements: §29A-3-1 refers to Chapter 29A, Article 3, Section 1.

Each of these division levels takes a different style to format the title line or heading of element.

In some situations, typically occurring with uniform or model law drafts, there is an addition

outline level, called the Part that appears between the Article and Section. When this is used,

there is a separate style to format the Part name in a bill:

For further breakdown of Code sections, please follow this outline form for the levels of division:

§ Section.
(a) subsection – lower case letters
(1) subdivision – Arabic numbers
(A) paragraph – upper case letters
(i) subparagraph – lower case Roman numerals
(ii)
(I) clause – upper case Roman numerals
(II)

By default, Microsoft Word attempts to create an outline or numbered list if you begin a

paragraph with a numeral or an enclosed letter. This can be very frustrating as it attempts to

format the following paragraphs according to its default list format. When working with bills, it is

recommended that you turn off the automated list function. The settings for this are in the

Options under the File tab.

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Go to the File tab and select ‘Options’ at the bottom of the list in the left margin. When the

Options dialog box appears, select ‘Proofing.’ You will then see a button for ‘AutoCorrect

Options.’

Click on this button and then look for the tab for ‘AutoFormat.’ In the first section under this tab,

un-check the boxes for ‘Automated bulleted lists’, for ‘List styles’, and for "Straight quotes" with

"smart quotes".

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In addition, you will need to look at some settings under the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab in

this same window.

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In the section labeled “Apply as you type” make sure that “Automatic bulleted lists” and

Automated numbered lists” are not checked. It will also be useful to uncheck the boxes for

"Straight quotes" with "smart quotes", “Fractions (1/2) with fraction character”, and “Ordinals

(1st) with superscript” because these conflict with the standard bill format.

USING HEADING SHORTCUTS

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If you use the chapter, article and section headings as shown in this guide, MS Word can use

those styles to give you a simple outline of the parts of your bill and help you navigate between

them. To view this outline, go to the Home tab on the document ribbon and look for the Find

button on the far, right end.

Click “Find” and a Navigation frame will open on the left side of the program window. Make sure

there is nothing entered in the search box (the white rectangle with the magnifier) and click on

“Headings.” This will show you the outline and you can navigate to each section by clicking on

its heading in this outline.

LINE NUMBERING

In the new bill format, line numbering restarts with each section of the bill rather than by page.

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Only the following portions of a bill have line numbering: the Bill Title and the text of each

section of the Code, but not the division headings. If you are working on rough drafts of your bill

and have no need to refer to the line numbers in discussion of the bill, then you do not need to

deal with where the line numbers start or restart. You may submit a draft bill to Central Bill

Drafting without bothering with the line numbering and this will be cleaned up before introduction

of the bill.

If, on the other hand, you wish to circulate your draft and you want people to refer to the same

line numbers, here is how to force the restart of line numbers for each section in your bill:

1. Move to the first Code section in the bill and place your cursor at the very beginning of

the first line in the body of the Code section.

2. Now go up to the ribbon and select the ‘PAGE LAYOUT’ tab.

3. When this tab is opened, you will see some buttons for Page Setup, including three

stacked icons for Breaks, Line Numbers, and Hyphenation. Select ‘Breaks,’ NOT ‘Line

Numbers.’

4. When you click on ‘Breaks,’ a drop-down menu will appear. Select ‘Continuous,’ the

fifth item down in this menu.

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 The line numbers in your first section will be automatically adjusted to begin with the first

line of text in the body of the section.

5. You will need to repeat this process for each section of Code in your bill.

STRIKE-THROUGHS, UNDERSCORES AND SYMBOLS

Underscores -There are several ways to underscore a section of text in Microsoft Word,

and the most convenient is to highlight the text you want to underscore and press Ctrl+U. This

will add underscoring to all of the text in the highlighted area.

Strike-throughs -There is currently just one, main way to mark text with strike-throughs.

To do this, you must have the HOME tab selected on the ribbon. In the group of Font controls,

there are several icons to alter the format of the text on your screen. Highlight the portion of text

that you want to strike-out and then click on the icon showing a small “abc” with strikethroughs:

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 Symbols –This guide cannot provide detailed instructions about adding special symbols,

except for one critical symbol: the section symbol §. There is a simple keystroke combination

that will add this symbol when you are typing. Hold down the Alt key and then, using the

numbers on the numeric keypad, type 21. When you release the Alt key, the symbol will

appear. You may only use the numeric keypad for this; it won’t work if you use the numbers at

the top of your keyboard.

FINISHING YOUR DRAFT

The last part of the bill that must be included is the bill’s purpose. As you are aware, the

purpose is set out in a Note at the end of the bill. The basic bill shell already has some text in

place for the Note as follows:

Simply click on the text “Enter Purpose” to insert your wording about the purpose of the bill.

Now both chambers of the Legislature use one, standard method for indicating new or deleted

text, and there is no longer a need to have different boilerplates about strike-throughs and

underscores. Therefore, this standard text has been added to the bill shell for you and does not

need to be modified.

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